


two can keep a secret / if one of them is dead

by ProwlingThunder



Category: Star Wars
Genre: Alternate Sith Schools, Broken Force Bonds, Captive Fic, Copious Use of Force for Dubious Reasons, Crafting Alternative History via Memory, Force Ability: Alter Mind, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Laws of the Empire, Laws of the Sith Empire, Self-Harm, Self-inflicted Suffering, Sith Lords
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:33:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22054096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProwlingThunder/pseuds/ProwlingThunder
Summary: Everything has to fall perfect for it to work, but his information is a little... outdated.
Kudos: 1





	two can keep a secret / if one of them is dead

It was a long shot and he had known that before he had ever decided follow through with the plan. It required a lot of things to go  _ perfectly, _ right from the beginning to the end. It required him to get in, to get an audience with the Emperor-- and it required him to be  _ right _ about the Emperor being a Sith Lord, instead of just a man. It required him to accept the kaggath, and then it required Eurynome to be the victor, which would only work if the Emperor (Darth Sidious, if all the information he had was correct) accepted a duel  _ and _ forgot that he could use the  _ rest of the Empire _ as a weapon.

A lot of things had to fall just right for him to pull this off.

And yet, he had known that. And he had gone anyway.

The reasons for going were pretty simple, all told. More and more the Empire grew, a yawning, endless hunger that was stretching through the universe. More and more Force sensitives vanished every cycle, regardless of where they walked or what they did. He heard-- rumors, of the Emperor sending out his right hand to hunt for them. Rumors, because that was all any of the smugglers could piece together.

Whole temples, now abandoned by their people or graveyards for them, are being destroyed. Not rumor: verifiable fact. Temple cities, overrun with Imperial forces, cultures being shoved aside and carved anew by the ruling body. Swaths of history, lost in the swing of a single order.

Not a one of those was actually on his mind when he went.

Children lost to the depths of a hungry darkness, though, that was.

Everything goes right until it all goes wrong.

He got an audience with the Emperor under a false name, but an identity that was still his own. He was a young noble from a world that had been lost, a name he would dare not utter for fear of his gods’ divine retribution. It was not  _ untrue; _ he was a Sith Lord, a Prince of Korriban by  _ right, _ and Korriban was gone, nigh uninhabitable, the final resting place of innumerable Sith Lords before him. 

But of course his invitation did not invite  _ Rama Eurynome _ to meet the Emperor, and so no Prince of the Sith was invited.

He showed up anyway, walked right through the front door, as quiet in the Force as the void of space.

Darth Vader was not in residence; information pointed him across star systems, far away from his Master’s side. Far enough away that Eurynome could not sense him through all that was Emperor Palpatine,  _ Emperor Sidious. _

Perhaps that should have been his first clue. 

_ What is power?  _ A philosophical ideal, mostly. The definition depended greatly on who was crafting the definition in question.

He thinks about that when he wakes up the first time, to a prick of an interrogation droid’s needle and Darth Vader’s visage. About how power is a subjective notion, a noun which could be applied to a large swath of things, some physical and some verily not.

(He thinks about storms of white and blindness from light and mountains so tall the air does not exist for plants to grow enmass. He thinks about rivers capped in a crush of droplets and sheets of stone and bristling plants that climb into the sky. He thinks of howling winds that drown out thought and peel at flesh.

He thinks about all of that. Someone tries to pry their way into his mind but this is what he is:

Someone tries to pry their way into all he is and this is what they are confronted with:)

When the other Sith Lord snarls and snags him by the throat, Eurynome can feel the bite of a Force collar against his skin, and he  _ laughs. _

The first session is harsh. 

The first session is a lesson and a choice. Eurynome makes it because if he doesn’t, he will not be able to live with himself and a Sith, above all, wants to  _ live. _

He isn’t just a Sith, however.

Vader leaves him, thwarted, frustrated. He leaves with nothing. Eurynome will not break in such a short interrogation. He knows it is impossible to avoid breaking forever, and he’ll never bend, never kneel. But against the strongest winds, even mountains fall.

But Vader leaves him with much more than the other Sith probably intended. He’s a man of raw power, that one, and that is not Eury, has never been him. Vader could kill him easily right now, if he wanted to. And he definitely wants to kill him, he knows he does, and he does not.

They want something else.

There are other things, too. Darth Vader has a  _ title. _ A Name. Bane’s name, of course, as Darth Sidious also carries, but a name, nevertheless. Only a fully realized Sith Lord should carry one.

Rama Eurynome challenged Darth Sidious to a Kaggath and was refused, and the hungry emperor set on him another Sith Lord, going to outside aid instead of standing on his own power. He has broken the rules of a kaggath twice over. Beaten he may be, but neither have the  _ right _ to kill him.

Except, of course, they are Bane’s students. Bane had never cared for rights, in the histories his master had collected. Bane had thought might  _ makes _ right.

So, again. He has something they want.

He  _ is _ a Sith Lord, however, so he intends to make sure they never get it purely for pettiness.

Eurynome came to this engagement with nothing more than the clothes on his back and a single lightsaber, built deliberately for the match and practiced with only enough for it to be comfortable in his hands. But he carried nothing else. 

He carried nothing else.

He knows how to keep secrets from those who have made themselves his enemy, however.

It was a secret he learned a long time ago.

_ “If I said you can learn nothing more from me, what would you do?” _

_ “If I have learned all I can from you, I will go elsewhere and learn from there. Only the foolish think they have mastered their crafts.” _

_ “Clever,” a sly smile, almost real except for where it wasn’t. But there was pride in her voice. He had learned through the years to hear when she doled out real praise, and this was one of those rare moments, not dolled up to gain her anything. “And if I said I had nothing more to teach you, what would you do?” _

_ “I will accept it and go elsewhere, and learn from others, though know you a liar, for no one teaches all they know to a single student.” _

_ “You know me well, young one.” _

_ “As well as you have let me,” he allowed himself to say, because it was true and because it was praise, as well. She had been a good teacher, for all her failings. He knew so much more now than he could have known otherwise. But so much of she herself is a mystery to him, and he has managed to keep so little of himself from her. _

_ “Then we shall part, in easy company, on amenable terms, and I will say neither.” She reached up with both hands, touching red fingers to his cheeks. “Yet I have one more thing I shall teach you, if you are ready?” _

_ “I will never be,” he swore. _

_ “That’s a good answer,” she agreed, and opened herself to him. _

A principal lesson of the Force is this: the Force flows through everything.

But a Sith Lord is not the sum total of his identity, merely a facet of the stone. He is also something else, something  _ more. _

He is a son and a brother, and while he has not seen them in some time, he will not betray the clan to outsiders. He is a student, once an Apprentice of his Master and though their paths may never cross again he will not draw the eye of this hunger upon her. He is a friend, a dangerous friend to dangerous people trying not to be dangerous anymore. A guardian, to one lost soul.

He is all of these things.

And he is a father.

It’s a simple phrase. The Force flows through everything. Eurynome knows that it is parroted by people who never stop to understand what they are really saying, who do not and can not understand the full wealth of those words. Even some of his dearest companions have said the words and not understood.

His own master had said the words and not understood.

He knows, however: the Force flows through everything.

When Darth Vader returns to try again, he reaches in and finds the snow deeper, the landscape changed; rivers are frozen where they before did not run, the mountains have shifted, new trees have grown atop the dead of old.

But of course, he didn’t notice that it had changed; his attention to detail has always been somewhat less than precise, for all his raw power in the Force, and all that matters is that it is mountains and trees and snow, and he will unearth everything to find the secrets buried there.

A force collar isn’t a unique tool, and Eurynome’s understanding of them is not superficial, even though he’s never worn one himself. The field they create to isolate the wearer works a little like polarization, repelling the Force from the outside from a centralized point-- or two, in the case of cuffs. A collar is more ideal because it encircles the brainstem, which is important almost purely because Force adepts typically need to  _ think, _ after they’ve been trained, to use the Force. Their natural instinctive manipulations of it have been trained out of them through repetition. Conversely Force cuffs work without disrupting the wearer’s natural rhythm, except in the ways that it should be disrupted by being connected to the greater Force.

Honestly, he’s rather flattered that they put him in a collar. It speaks of all the ways they still think he is dangerous.

But he isn’t like most others. He can connect to the Force easily, reach out and let it flow through him so he can channel it where he needs it, but it’s really just a trickle compared to the ocean that Darth Vader had flattened him with. Perhaps he could reach that much Force at once, if he was prepared to hollow himself out of everything else.  _ Flood the fields, _ so to speak. Drown everything. 

He has never needed  _ that much _ of the Force. His teacher had used it to supplement her natural skills, a single bloodflower hidden amongst plom, to draw the eye only when she wanted to draw the eye. Eurynome has ever trained his abilities to use the smallest possible measure to hide himself entirely, not as a flower but as the breathe between them.

The side effect of using the smallest possible measurement means he has gotten  _ really good _ at feeling the slimmest possible trickles of the Force, and really good at applying it precisely where he wants it to go. And as his training has, over his life, been chiefly about self-application, he is really good at doing so  _ in himself. _ So he closes his eyes and breathes, and reaches-- not out but  _ in, _ into the core of himself, where the Force converged and bundled together to make him who he  _ was, _ and tied him still to others, connections for the heart.

He was a being who could not live alone, not truly, not sane. But to save them…

_ I love you, _ he told them fiercely, not in words but in the sense of it, the bonds of essence. He tried to project his fierce gratitude and how much he would do for them, the difficulty it was what he was about to do, the hope that they would  _ live _ for him, despite him, though it would be the hardest thing they may ever do.  _ I love you, _ in the knowledge that he would tear apart the stars for them, tear apart the fabric of life.

Tear apart himself for them.

And then he reached for the strongest thread, the bond that would hurt more than anything, whose heart was sweetest but was just--  _ just _ old enough to understand, and that was grief so strong he almost couldn’t bear it, but.

_ I love you, my panther, _ he promised, and he could see her in his minds’ eye, chubby little fingers reaching for him, her bright hair a silken flag, his mother’s golden eyes staring up at him. A bright star. His brightest, most precious treasure. He prayed their distance was enough to numb it, and then twisted, pulled--

Rama Eurynome screamed, and wept.

It would have been easier to tear his own limbs off, again and again until they were all free of him.

After, whole form trembling, body sagging bonelessly in his captivity, he reaches not out into the raw cavities he has carved into himself, but elsewhere. The emptiness is agony. Loneliness. Knowledge of their pain. It hurts more than anything he has ever experienced, and he knows now why it is so hard to survive. No one is meant to survive this.

_ “Here is the secret,” his master whispers into his mind, wraps it up in him, and he takes it as he is meant to, never to use, for who would ever need to use this knowledge, great and terrible as it is? _

He reaches out past the mountains and snow and evergreens, into his memories, pulling and pooling the Force inside his body; already he is exhausted, but this he has used none of yet, and now he needs it more than ever. Severed means they cannot hurt him to hurt them, but  _ he _ is still a danger to them, and he will not let himself be. He cradles the Force inside his mind, where neurons build connections, where memories are stored. He has used this on others, for tiny things, moments, shards of time.

Now he must change the stone.

_ My family died in the war, _ he tells himself, mother, father, brothers and sisters, they were on a planet and the Separatists killed them, they died alone and far from him and he couldn’t have helped them even if he had known, but they died. The grief he feels isn’t fake, channeled from broken bonds; his mother’s people bond so, so easily, these he had nurtured since infancy, his own or theirs.

_ My friends died in the war, _ he tells himself, ruined star charts and burnt cafe, white plastoid,  _ the Jedi have turned against the Republic _ on every comm in the ‘verse, knowledge that they’d been put down by the soldiers they had loved, and none of this grief is faked, either. The memory is tempered by the knowledge that he saved  _ one, _ the truth, he’d saved one and he’d taken her and in doing so he’d shattered all that she was--

He takes a nightmare that ruins him and he twists it, turns it, violently red hair and a padawan braid and a swollen belly and a drop and so much blood, horror and fear and  _ grief, my daughter, my daughter--!! _

He has seen worse things. It is not hard to imagine the blood, the sprawl, the way a body looks when the soul is no longer there. He takes every bit of it and he shapes it until the narrative is correct, and then he tells it to himself, again and again, leaning on the Force and letting it soak in the knowledge, build bridges, connections, until these memories are as real, more real, than the reality through which he had lived, that which becomes fantasy, hopeful-wishes, naught more than daydreams; might his friends have lived, safe with a family of their own, how it might have grown, how his daughter might have been, with the shock of her mother’s hair and the paleness of his own shot through it.

He tells himself all of this until it rings in the Force as  _ true. _

And then he takes the Force and lives, and lives, inside the confines of his own mind, one year, and then two and then ten and then more, until nothing he knows or knew is but a memory, until the grief ebbs, just a little, just enough, until he can breathe around the wounds, scarred but never gone.

When Vader comes for the second interrogation, Rama Eurynome has been imprisoned for decades, according to memory, and there is nothing precious left to him for Vader to find.

_ “All which heals a shattered bond, my Apprentice, is time.” _

**Author's Note:**

> Kaggath: Ancient Sith Rite.  
> One Sith could challenge another Sith for any reason, be it strife, anger, vengeance, greed or pure dislike. The challenger set the arena, whether a planet, a star system or the entire galaxy, and if accepted by the challengee, the ritual began.  
> The two combatants employed the full force of their armies, bases and ships to outwit and outmaneuver their opponent in an attempt to defeat each other's forces.  
> The battles had to be fought without any kind of outside help, in a direct confrontation of one Sith's power and assets against another's. The breach of any rule of the rite usually resulted in the execution of the offender by other Sith not involved in that particular Kaggath, If one declined a Kaggath the Sith who challenged the other Sith would get his or her rank.  
> \--Wookieepedia


End file.
